A text from Marlene pops up on the screen. She’s married, she’s a mommy. Every day we have less in common and she’s another one who grows silent when I mention Jon, which I don’t, not since she had the baby. I drop the whisk in the bowl.
Mar! Hey!
So…The latest. I’m breast-feeding I need news please.
I’m still not painting but a lot of artists take sabbaticals and I’m learning how to be a human. You would be proud. Do you know I can whisk?
Lolol I meant you and Care, are you moved in?
I’m here.
But can I put up that picture we got of you guys when we visited?
I stare at the screen. Marlene knows better. She’s well aware that I’ve kept this relationship offline and I’ve rolled out all the same excuses with her.
Okay…I’m going away now. But when you do decide that this isn’t the kind of thing you have to hide from people please let me know lol bored new mommy seeking to live vicariously through sexy New Yorkers!
And then she’s gone. I’m whisking eggs again. Harder now. I fucked it all up. The oil is burnt. The whites aren’t doing what they did in the video. I toss them into the disposal.
“Hey,” Carrig says. “What’s wrong?”
“I destroyed breakfast.”
He smiles. “It was gonna be bad anyway.”
There’s one thing that’s not perfect. His teasing. Sometimes I hear his mother in there. But I know what Marlene would say. Who doesn’t? He’s rubbing my shoulders, biting his lip. “You are the cutest fucking thing in the world,” he says.
I lay my hands on his. “I love you.”
“I know,” he says. “Do you know, before you, I had to take an Ambien just to crash for three hours.”
“Care…”
“Let me finish,” he says. “My doctor said it’s anxiety, it’s a common thing for bankers because of the stress, the market, the grind. So I took the pills when I needed to. And then you came back into my life. And now you’re not sleeping, because you’re in love, and I want you to know that it’s the same reason I am sleeping. And I love us for how different we are. I love our opposite parts, our same parts. I love you.”
I can feel his heart pounding faster. I can see his reflection in the oven door, just the shadows. I’m sure he’s sweating.
“You’re supposed to get down on one knee to do this,” he says. “But you know I look up to you. I’ve always looked up to you. There’s nobody like you, Chloe. I don’t want you to say yes to me,” he says. “I want you to say yes to us.”
There is a ring on my finger. I missed the big reveal of it, the shine. It’s the right kind of ring. It fits and it feels good, as if my finger was yearning for something to keep it attached to my hand. I picture the finger spinning off, the ring falling. I squeeze my eyelids. At some point I’m gonna have to start sleeping again. Sleeping or painting. I gulp.
“Well,” he says, just like a guy in a jewelry store commercial, like a man who craves devotion, love, home, a man at his most vulnerable, a man who needs a woman. “Well,” he says again, so nervous, so exposed. “Do you like it?”
EGGS
Here’s what cancer is, it’s the same fucking thing you saw yesterday and today (Sorry, Lo), it’s the end of adventure, it’s the commercials on TV, the boiled noodles you upchuck, the look on Lo’s face when you ask her for the fourth time in six hours if she steeped your tea for fifteen minutes, not ten (Sorry, Lo), the same as yesterday (Sorry, Lo), the ostomy bag filling up, your wife bending over to clean up the vomit and your wife bending over again, to inspect the ostomy bag when you think it’s messed up again (Sorry, Lo). Cancer is knowing that you got it because you fucked up. You’re not some kid, some victim. No. You’re the asshole who got so obsessed with the coronaries and the Beard that he missed his chance to nip it in the bud. I played God and what did I do? I fucked myself. Stage IV bladder cancer, miracle I’m alive.
If that’s what you want to call it. Ever since the surgery, since the chemo, my life is mostly here, in the living room (what a fucking name for it), and my person is only Lo, coming on now. “Did you take your Urelle?” she asks.
“Yes, I did,” I say, as if I can ever atone for all the time lost, all the trips to CVS she’s made, as if what we needed was more expenses, more agony.
She glances at my iPad. “Is that all charged up?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Do you want me to sit with you?”
It’s the worst of all the questions. Did you move your bowels? Did you finish the water? Did you keep down the melba toast? Did you clean your catheter? Somehow none of them compare to that one, as if I’m a baby that needs watching.
“You go on,” I tell her. “I’m fine.”
She picks up her purse and swings it over her shoulder. She’s going to see Chuckie, and she’s brittle, digging around in her purse for her keys. I can feel her thinking it all the time. If only you’d gone to the doctor, you’d be going with me right now. But I’m sick, low white count. So going to see Chuckie has turned from a thing I won’t do to a thing I can’t do. I think of her in our bed alone, wondering how this happened to her, her son living in a hospital and her husband living on a sofa, both stubborn, inscrutable. She pulls her keys out of her purse. “Eggie,” she says. I am her patient, not her husband. “You have to take the multivitamin at eight.”
“Eight is great, Lo.”
When she kisses me on the forehead, it’s because she has to, not because she wants to.
“I’ll text you and see if you want anything.”
“I’m good, Lo.”
“Marko might stop by,” she says. “His girlfriend made us a casserole, something, I don’t know.”
I nod. “That’s nice.”
Lo’s kids, they’ve taken this cancer, they’ve made it into a project, filling our house with quilts and casseroles, marijuana pills, you name it. When Lo refers to them as our kids I don’t argue. It’s the worst thing about the cancer, our kids. But I don’t complain. I try my best to do right by Lo. I don’t search for solutions online the way I did when Chuckie got sick. I do every goddamn thing those doctors tell me to do. I follow directions and I don’t ask questions and when Lo drives me to the doctor I hum along to whatever’s playing on the radio.
But I’m not perfect. Who is? When she’s gone, when I can’t see her car, I get up off my couch—the dizziness—and I get my cane—my cane, our kids—and I make my way up to Chuckie’s room, to my boxes. Lo thinks I don’t come up here much, she’d worry about me on the stairs. But I have to come up here. I fall asleep on the sofa too easily and I can’t do any research on the iPad because she’d see. But she never comes up here, not anymore.
I sit at my desk, breathless.
I turn on my computer. The cancer is my fault, that’s the bad news. But the good news is that I might not be crazy. In the past year, seven drug-dealing sociopathic shitheads have dropped dead in Lynn, Massachusetts. I got a box going on these coronaries, these dead kids, all of them under thirty. Seven, an unprecedented number.
The first one happened just a day or so after I pissed blood at Tenley’s. I read about it in the paper in a waiting room at the hospital. A drug dealer, dead. I made a mental note and I tracked down an old buddy of mine who works in Lynn, Felix Mort. He’s not the brightest bulb, he moved to Lynn because his wife’s family’s from there and then they got there and she left him about six weeks later, because obviously she wanted to move there to get back with an old beau. She was only using Felix to get her set up so she could rekindle things, play it coy. He would drive to Providence and sulk on the sofa and Lo would tell him it would be okay, that he’d meet someone. And then he’d pass out and she’d kiss me, say you just could tell, poor Felix, still living in Lynn, he’s never gonna meet anyone.
Anyway, I rang him up to get more details
on the coronary. Guy was a thug, he said, no track marks, prelim screens were clear, just pot, none of the real stuff. “Dealers not doers,” he said. “Hey, how’s Lo?”
“Good, but wait, is there a history of heart failure?”
Felix laughed. “This guy had no heart, Eggie. All he had was a record.”
One month later another thug drops dead. I start my chemo.
Next month another death. I lose my hair.
And then another. And so on. Every month I fight my cancer and these thugs in Lynn just keep dying. I call Felix, he thinks he hit the jackpot, he’s buying scratch tickets, this is how lucky he feels, these guys, these guys at the top of his list, the guys who get away with the worst things in the world because they employ people to cover for them, these guys are dropping like flies. He believes in God now; he’s dating a girl he met in church. I’m not sure about our Holy Father, not with the way I feel, not with the burning inside of me, poison eating me from the inside out, but I do believe in the Beard. I believe he is there. More and more every day.
These thugs, they all die alone. They’re all bad guys; the worst is a gym teacher setting his kids up with crack. I press Felix for details on the teacher one day and he sighs.
“Vicky dumped me.”
“Jeez, Felix, I’m sorry, I’m just really sick from the chemo. I want to hear about it, but I just wanted to know, the teacher, anything more on him?”
You think cancer is a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it isn’t always. Felix lost his mom to cancer when he was a kid. Someone like me gets it, someone old, he just shrugs, we all die of something. So I’m not surprised, not really, when the next time I call Felix, it goes to voicemail and he never gets back to me.
Fuck Felix.
I know it’s the Beard. Eleven dead in Lynn, all under thirty, but more important, zero young coronaries in Providence in the same time span. Numbers don’t lie.
But how does he do it?
Downstairs, the doorbell chimes. Marko. I’ll never make it down in time and I can’t have him coming up here. It rings again and I hear them out there, I hear them looking for the key, I hear them finding the key. Double fuck. I close the computer. I listen to them come in, Marko and the girl, the whispering.
Marko, maybe he’s asleep. Should we check in the bedroom?
Nah, babe, let’s just leave this in the fridge. We don’t wanna wake him up.
But shouldn’t we make sure he’s okay?
Of course he’s okay. Guys like him beat it. He’s old-school.
I hear him kiss her, lucky bastard. She giggles. They’re so young I could kill them, and now they’re moving around, trespassing, thinking they’ve lucked into something here, a moment to snoop through the teacher’s desk. My cheeks redden and I hear the drawers open. I hear them marvel at our bills, our expenses.
And then they get tired of us—too depressing the girlfriend says, how much bad luck can people have, right? I hear him kiss her now, really kiss her, tell her how lucky he is to have her, how they’re gonna do it right, they’re gonna cherish every day. When he starts to take off her blouse, when I hear the table rattling, when I know this is real—Marko is going to bang his girlfriend on my kitchen table and I am going to hear it happen—I try to block out the sound. I make earmuffs with my hands. I stare at the duckies on the wall and cancer is creative, it finds a new way to make every day your worst day yet, it’s my hands pressing into my ears, hard, as if there’s any way to stop yourself from hearing young people fuck, fuck.
* * *
—
Later that night I’m back downstairs on the sofa and Lo tries to feed me Marko and Bella’s lasagna. I tell her I’m not hungry but she forces me to try a bite and unfortunately it’s delicious, sweet with ricotta, melty cheese, the noodles flat how I like. I eat a whole slice of it and I think about the Beard, Theo Ward, off in Lynn, that’s gotta be him, out there knocking off drug dealers.
Lo moans. “Eggie, this might be the best thing I ever ate, right?”
Cancer is when your wife is right and your kids knocked it out of the park with the lasagna but the Beard is in Lynn and you are on a sofa, nauseous. I lick my fork.
“Lo,” I say. “Ya better pass me that bucket.”
JON
The next morning I walk down to the water, to King Beach, maybe my favorite place in the whole city. I love it here, the metal and concrete against the water. There’s this drop-off walkway where the ocean hits this wall below, and when I stand there I feel like a hero of the sea, like Leo in Titanic.
I sit on a splintery bench I think of as mine and I call my mom. I started calling again once I got here. It felt safe. Like now that I have purpose, I could call home once a week like real people do.
She always picks up, always coughing. “Jon.”
“Mom.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Jon, I won’t tell anyone. Just tell me where you are. I hear the water.”
“I’m by the beach.”
“What beach?”
“You okay? Dad okay?”
“Why won’t you come home?”
I can’t tell her that I will come home. I can’t tell her that I’m a superhero, a crime-fighting superhero. She’d call the cops on me and that would be a disaster. She always takes over the conversation anyway. She tells me random things, about a woman she doesn’t like at work and some tree my dad cut down in the yard. And then we’re quiet. And then she cries.
“I love you, Mom.”
“Then come home,” she says. “Let me see you, let me hug you.”
She is hyperventilating and pouring wine and she was not meant to have this kind of life. She isn’t strong enough to have her one and only son get kidnapped and then come home and then go away again.
“Tell Dad I miss him,” I say and then I hang up.
I don’t cry. I refuse to cry the way a person in a restaurant refuses to order dessert.
I stare at the water. When my mom turned thirty-five, her friends got her ten sessions with a personal trainer at a gym. He was named Cleo and the first session she came home with red slick skin and a big smile. I love Cleo! And he said I was great. I was already getting the hang of it. My dad and I made bets about how long it would last. She went again three days later and this time she came home sweaty. She wasn’t glistening. She was rubbing her lower back. The jerk teaches me to do all these moves and today he forces me onto all these new machines. My dad cackled. Only way to get in shape is to surprise your muscles, Pen. Nothing’s worth a dang once you know how to do it. Your body just goes right back on autopilot. My dad won the bet. My mom never went back after that second time. She said she understood why they call it “working out” and that it wasn’t the right job for her.
This is the right job for me, cleaning up the streets, staking out my targets. I don’t accept my fate, but I accept my role in someone else’s fate.
* * *
—
Incy lives on Alley Street and the sun has come out by the time I get over there, as if the skies are smiling upon me. I feel like a doctor going into surgery. It’s not like I’m happy about what I have to do. I’m aware that the Bruin has some tough days ahead, but there’s also the possibility that the Bruin will be better off, her baby too.
Incy is alone in her house. I’ve watched her for weeks now and I know her ways. This is the only time she’s ever truly on her own. She cracks her window for that first cigarette. I’ve seen her do it a hundred times. She doesn’t look at her phone while she puffs. She looks out the window. You wouldn’t assume that she’s a vicious, murdering psychopathic drug pusher. There’s nothing going on in her mind, in her heart. A chill runs over me. Of course there isn’t. That’s how she’s able to do what she does.
I take a deep breath. She’s got one puff left, m
aybe two. Then she’ll flick the butt into the yard and go into her bathroom. I get out of my car and cross the street. Nobody’s up yet, nobody’s looking. I pull on the cracked window and it gives. Incy’s house smells like lemons and bleach. She’s singing in the shower—I can’t sleep at night, I toss and turn, listening for the telephone—and it’s an old song, Bobby Brown, I think. It’s a short walk from the living room to the bathroom and “Every Little Step” is the song I’ll hear every time I think of her for the rest of my life; what I’ll see are the scars on her back, deep and dry, deflecting the water.
She puts her hands up—Hey now—and she thinks I’m going to attack her—and I’ve never seen her this scared and for a minute there I lose my nerve, because she is a woman in a shower, unclothed, and I am the intruder, and on what planet could I be the one in the right?
There’s a way to speak to someone without opening your mouth, and Incy does not die afraid of me, the male intruder. I know she knows what this is, even if she doesn’t know how I will kill her, there is no gun, no knife, I know she dies afraid of where she is going, if there is a place like hell, she expects to be there.
She is dead now. And there’s something calm and unsurprised in her eyes, as if she always expected it would end like this, with the water running and her wounds exposed.
I want to reach into the shower and turn off the faucet. It doesn’t seem right to leave her like this, the water shooting at her torso. But I can’t do that, I can’t tip off the police. When you die of a heart attack in the shower, you die alone.
* * *
—
I get two dinners. And it feels like an act of respect on some level. A way to honor the dead. The other polystyrene box of Chinese sits in the passenger seat of my car, untouched, Incy’s last supper. I turn on the radio, but there’s no news yet. I look at the clock: 4:13.
And then I hear classic rock blasting. Anyone who lives in New England can tell you what that means, the sound of Journey, the familiar rhythms warbled and crunchy from a weak radio, offset by the sound of a truck going too fast, hitting potholes. It’s landscapers. I sink lower and recline my seat. They pull up in front of Roger’s house.
Providence Page 21